Which *BSD would work best on a duel core celeron with 4GB of non- upgradable RAM? reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kyleW_ne · 2021-03-29 23:18 Just wondering what *BSD I would have the most hope running on my low end laptop? Have experience with OpenBSD and FreeBSD and open to learning NetBSD (which I have used some). Thanks in advance! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gumnos · 2021-03-30 00:06 It would largely depend on the processor (i386 vs amd64, or something else?) and what you aspire to do with it. Last I checked, OpenBSD on i386 has a pretty bleak set of browser options (no recent builds of Firefox or Chromium). All three of my i386 machines run OpenBSD so I don't have one to readily test FreeBSD or NetBSD browsers on right now. The two netbooks are maxed out at 2GB of RAM and the oldest one is maxed out at 320MB (yes, MB, less than my RPi's 512MB) of RAM. That said, it should still be reasonably good to tinker with CLI stuff and non-web-based stuff. One of my i386 acts as my VPN jump host, another hosts some backups (the 3rd one is the one I'd hose if I were to go test some FreeBSD or NetBSD). At any given time, they also provide various services including HTTP/HTTPS, database, mail, LDAP, etc. None of them are tremendous powerhouses, but they plod along just fine. If it's an amd64 processor, you have more options. While 4GB of RAM isn't spacious, it's also quite usable for some light web-browsing with a couple tabs open. And with that all said, I'd say the main goal would be to have fun and learn something. I find that OpenBSD (and maybe NetBSD, though similar to you, I have less experience with it) tends to run a little better on wimpier hardware than FreeBSD does, but all three are fine options. As a side note, I tried installing Haiku on that junker netbook, and it was *amazingly* fast. Not my daily driver, but a fun little experiment, and the shell felt like home. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kyleW_ne · 2021-03-30 01:36 Thank you for a great reply. The 4GB in question is an AMD64 system. I too have a 2GB i686 atom netbook that I have not found a good use for (OpenBSD runs great on it but has no driver for its wifi card, FreeBSD has a driver for its wifi card but crashes at boot, and Linux just acts strange on it). The 4GB dual core AMD64 Celeron is my best laptop at the moment unfortunately. (I really need to invest in a used thinkpad, but Covid-19 financial woes...) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gumnos · 2021-03-30 01:47 The couple other questions stuck in my head re. graphics, networking, and disk. **Disk:** Is it spinning-rust or an SSD? How big (roughly)? Data fits comfortably, data fits in less than half the space? How important is your data (do you back up important data to another machine, to an external drive, or some cloud service, etc)? I really like the data- integrity and self-healing aspects of ZFS which comes native with FreeBSD (and isn't nearly the RAM hog it developed an early reputation for…it works fine on those 2GB netbooks with plenty of RAM to spare and can be tuned even better). **Networking:** Do you know what wifi (and/or wired) chipset is in your amd64/4GB machine? You can check them against the list of supported chipsets to see what sort of luck you can expect. I had to replace the wifi chipsets in my (Dell Mini9 & Mini10) netbooks since they were Broadcom junk (unreliable at best, lying and non-functional at worst), but each Atheros mini-PCI/half-mini-PCI card was under $10. Much more reliable, less headache, and I think they even offer HOSTAP if I ever wanted to turn them into wifi routers. **Graphics:** it would also be worth investigating the graphics chipset in the machine. Many should be supported, but best to check hardware compat. lists. One of those aforementioned netbooks has an unsupported GMA500 so ends up in VESA mode, meaning *anything* graphical is super slow. As you might guess, my collection skews more towards "vintage" than "bleeding edge high performance computing", so I feel your discomfort :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kyleW_ne · 2021-03-30 01:58 The 4GB model has a small sata3 SSD, intel wireless nic that is supported by OpenBSD (I checked the glorious man pages) so I assume FreeBSD supports it too, It is regular Intel integrated graphics. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fuckwit-mcbumcrumble · 2021-03-30 17:44 https://i.imgur.com/lYFKQl9.jpg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kormoraan · 2021-03-30 20:53 username checks out